PAX East is this week! We’re excited for PAX, can you tell? We’ll be running a panel and wearing Gamer Assembly T-Shirts, so feel free to introduce yourself if you see one of us. We’ve got a great slate of links this week, so let’s get to ‘em…

At Home

Only 4 Gaming Days Until PAX East! If you’ll be in Boston on Easter weekend April 6-8, you owe it to yourself to attend the best gaming con. Three-day passes have sold out, but you can still pick up day passes. We’ll be there running the “Fix Your RPG Problems with the RPG Doctor and Gamer Assembly” panel on Friday, April 6 at 7 pm in the Merman Theatre. Will we see you there?

April’s Blog Theme at The Gamer Assembly is “Gaming Fools”, covering the outlandish, crazy, and over-the-top games and situations that grace every table. Have a gonzo RPG article idea? Contact us for guest blogger opportunities!

The Call To Assembly, Volume 1, our collection of the first 2 months of Gamer Assembly posts is now available as a free PDF at RPG Now and as a not-free printed magazine at Lulu!

Designer Tool: A Blank Playing Card Template by Brent Newhall provides a pre-formattted template for Excel or OpenOffice to quickly churn out a deck of cards for playtesting by printing 6 standard-sized cards per sheet of paper. You’re on your own for printing card backs and cutting the cards.

Away

Content from people involved with The Gamer Assembly posted elsewhere across the Internet.

And while we’re short on time, No More Average Campaigns at Gnome Stew says there’s no shame in killing an average campaign since there’s only so much gaming time to go around. Go for the awesome and eschew the merely adequate.

It’s a Man Ray Kind of Sky encourages all of us to out ourselves as gamers and to shed the mantle of self-loathing. “People often ask how wargamers justify their fascination with playing games about mass destruction. … The best argument I’ve heard is who cares, because if you don’t like it, you’re free to go to hell.”

If you’re looking for really good anecdotes from the gaming table, take a long look at the Fake War Stories Tumblr. Yeah, there’s an Arrow of Slaying for that.

Risking It All on the just-launched-this-week blog Character Generation shares a simple equation involving risk and impact that explains why we strive for the heroic even when the rules don’t support that choice. Congratulations on the blog launch, and I look forward to more great articles from Liz and Lyndsay in the weeks and months to come!

Character Generation is also mentioned in Space Race over at Some Space to Think. The rest of the article covers how Bulldogs! handles race using a short list of attributes to pick from. It’s a great technique that can extend beyond FATE to breathe some life into PC races in other systems as well. You can also use the same approach to make institutions like martial arts schools have a specific and recognizable flavor.

The Bard for Basic D&D at Strange Magic reimagines the much-maligned bard in OD&D or OSR systems as a sub-class of Magic User who can wear leather armor and identify magic items. I really like the flavor that brings to the Bard.

A 3×5 Map Experiment expands dungeon geomorphs into small connected dungeon areas drawn on 3×5 cards. That’s a great-looking dungeon shown in the article over at Blood of Prokopius, plus a challenge to make more 3×5 maps to hook together into more organic-looking larger dungeons.

Also on the mapping front, Dungeons of Carcassonne at In My Campaign presents the kernel of an idea to adapt Carcassonne kingdom tiles for use as random dungeon tiles. I’d love to see this fleshed out a bit more.

MetaRoundup

A roundup of roundups featuring links of interest to the tabletop RPG community.Please let us know about other weekly roundups in the comments!

Game Knight Reviews comes out with Friday Knight News on Fridays. Check out this week’s news to see 10 secrets to creating unforgettable supporting characters, players taking center stage less (and more) often than they should, and achieving a state of Flow in gaming.

Keith Davies maintains In My Campaign and he publishes a collection of Links of the Week including recommended Kickstarter projects and interesting YouTube videos. Take a look at this week’s collection which includes the five rules of monster design, Kickstarter rewards for retailers, and a tower defense game built on top of 8-Bit Google Maps called MapsTD.